Several Readers Contribute to Cryptogon
February 14th, 2007Thank you all very much!
JB $35
JS $35
General Patton $6
The New PSYOP Payload: Bird Flu and the Collapse of the Internet
February 14th, 2007I’m still paying attention to the fallout from the incident involving the root DNS nodes. In the course of following that story, I came across the Strong Angel III operation, which proposed a scenario involving a pandemic avian flu outbreak with follow-on strategic information warfare attacks.
Today, Slashdot linked to a story from last June that I hadn’t come across:
Would the Bird Flu Kill the Internet, Too? Long quote, but stick with it, especially the part near the end:
If a bird flu pandemic sweeps the nation, we could avoid infection by working from home via the Internet.
Or, hammered by overuse, the Internet could shut down within two to four days of an outbreak, eliminating telecommuting as a viable option.
Disturbingly, that was one finding of a simulation, or war game, held in January in Davos, Switzerland, by the World Economic Forum and management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. More than 30 senior industry and governmental executives played out the arrival of the flu in Germany from Eastern Europe — and the results weren’t pretty.
“We assumed total absentees of 30% to 60% trying to work from home, which would have overwhelmed the Internet,” said participant Bill Thoet, vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton. “We did not assume that the backbone would be gone, but that the edge of the network, where everyone was trying to access their office from home, would be overwhelmed. The absence of maintenance was also a factor. The person who brought up the problem was himself a CEO of an Internet service provider.
“The conclusion [of imminent collapse] was not absolute, and the situation was not digitally simulated, but the idea of everyone working from home appears untenable,” Thoet said.
On this side of the Atlantic, predictions about how the Internet would fare in the face of a pandemic are less dire.
“We don’t believe that the Internet will be compromised within a matter of hours or days,” said Brent Woodworth, worldwide manager for IBM’s Crisis Response Team, which does consulting on disaster preparedness. “Most Internet traffic is reroutable, and as different areas are affected at different rates by a pandemic, the networks could anticipate increased traffic and adjust accordingly — with the caveat that critical components will be maintained.”
I’m not going to even deal with the fact that Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. was involved with this, or that the topic was addressed at the annual World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland. Someone could probably make a career out of following up those points alone.
I want to focus on nine words from the excerpt above. I’m sure you propellerheads already know which nine words I’m talking about:
…With the caveat that critical components will be maintained.
One more time, from my informal essay on information warfare written in 2002:
You always hear that the Internet was designed to route information around dead or crowded nodes. Well, what you don’t hear is that this theory only applies when the amount of traffic on the system DOES NOT OVERWHELM the routers, switches and communications media. If transcon and intercity OC-192s and OC-768s start going down, the sudden traffic overflow onto the lower tiered intercity connections will bring everything to a grinding halt. Couple that with attacks on root DNS nodes and DOS attacks on systems still standing…
Put a fork in it, ladies and gentlemen. It’s done.
But wait, there’s more. This was just published yesterday: Flu Pandemic Could Choke Internet, Requiring Usage Restrictions:
Many companies and government agencies are counting on legions of teleworkers to keep their operations running in the event of an influenza pandemic. But those plans may quickly fall apart as millions of people turn to the Internet for news and even entertainment, potentially producing a bandwidth-choking surge in online traffic.
Such a surge would almost certainly prompt calls to restrict or prioritize traffic, such as blocking video transmissions wherever possible, according to business continuity planners who gathered on Friday at a SunGard Availability Systems hot-site facility in northern New Jersey to consider the impact of a pandemic on the Internet.
Businesses as well as home users likely would be asked to voluntarily restrict high-bandwidth traffic, the planners said. And if asking didn’t work, they warned, government action to restrict traffic might well follow.
“Is there a need for a YouTube during a national emergency?” [OR A CRYPTOGON, OR A LIFEAFTERTHEOILCRASH OR A WHATREALLYHAPPENED?—Kevin] asked John Thomas, vice president of enterprise systems at a large, New York-based financial institution that he asked not be identified.
Whether the avian flu will morph into a human pandemic is unclear. But if it does, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths could result worldwide. To try to limit a pandemic’s spread, many people will seek to work from home. Consequently, “the demand for communication will soar,” said Renate Noone, vice president of professional services at SunGard’s Availability Services unit.
Out of the vast, swirling cloud banks of speculative collapse theories, They seem to like this Bird Flu / Internet Collapse dog and pony show right now.
Remember what I said about that astonishing Brzezinski episode?
I don’t think that it’s possible to know which trick is going to be pulled with any precision. But they’re going to have to try to fit ten pounds of shit into a five pound bag, and soon. The question is how to blame “the terrorists†for the crash without the thing leading to nuclear war. I’m guessing that this Brzezinski thing is like saying, “Don’t do it ‘that’ way. Go back to the drawing board. We don’t want it to play out like ‘that.’†Iraq is clearly out of control. Add Iran to the mix? I don’t see how they maintain any level of control (militarily, politically, economically, take your pick) with an order of magnitude increase in the chaos on the ground. I think this crossed Brzezinski’s mind, and the minds of his handlers.
Is it possible that “the terrorists” have become too ridiculous of a meme for even the average imbecile on the street to believe anymore? The problem with 9/11 is that the dust settled too quickly. Uncomfortable questions started appearing way too fast… I don’t personally know anyone who believes the official 9/11 story anymore.
Hell, maybe they’ll throw in Bin Laden for bonus shock and awe value: Flying around on a magic carpet, spraying the Homeland with terrorist cooties and worse. Yeah, that’s the ticket! Why not? That way, They get the effects of 9/11, but it keeps on killing and terrifying people long after the “attack” begins…. You can almost see Cheney’s crooked grin.
So, how could They improve on “the terroristst” PSYOP payload?
It’s impossible to know for sure…
But if the Internet goes down, life as you know it ends and soldiers are going door to door making sure that you have received your required “vaccination” against whatever .mil engineered plague has just been released, you’ll pretty much have your answer.
Preview: FLU PANDEMIC: NEW ZEALAND’S MARTIAL LAW CONTINGENCY PLAN
The biggest question I have is how many Americans, Aussies and Poms were in on this. Kiwis, in general, and even Kiwi politicians, aren’t this adept at evil. I’d look to the usual suspects for the genesis of this diabolical plot. Again, I don’t know where this script came from, but it just doesn’t feel like it’s from here.
Mission Accomplished: Iraq Closes Borders and Extends Curfews
February 13th, 2007Via: Guardian:
The Iraqi government today said it would close its borders with Syria and Iran and extend a night curfew in Baghdad as part of its new security plan.
Lieutenant General Abboud Qanbar, the commander leading the latest attempt to curb violence in Baghdad, announced the measures on Iraqi state television.
Gen Qanbar said the border with Iran would be closed for 72 hours. He did not say how long the border with Syria would be closed for, but extended frontiers mean any attempt to seal the borders would be extremely hard to enforce.
Scientist Finds New Ocean in Inner Earth
February 13th, 2007Etidorhpa? I couldn’t resit.
Via: Science Blog:
A seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis has made the first 3-D model of seismic wave damping — diminishing — deep in the Earth’s mantle and has revealed the existence of an underground water reservoir at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.
It is the first evidence for water existing in the Earth’s deep mantle.
Michael E. Wysession, Ph.D., Washington University professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, working with former graduate student Jesse Lawrence (now at the University of California, San Diego), analyzed 80,000 shear waves from more than 600,000 seismograms and found a large area in Earth’s lower mantle beneath eastern Asia where water is damping out, or attenuating, seismic waves from earthquakes.
The traditional method seismologists use to image the Earth below us is to measure the speed of seismic waves. This will provide a sort of CAT scan of the Earth’s core and mantle. Using wave speeds alone is a problem, however, because they cannot distinguish between temperature and composition variations.
The research is described in a forthcoming monograph, Earth’s Deep Water Cycle, which is in press to be published by the American Geophysical Union.
Direct Correlation Between Computing Power and Doom?
February 13th, 2007An 80 core CPU? Massively parallel home computers? I don’t know whether this news is more absurd or obscene.
Oh sure, better games, HDTV, AI. Notice how none of this crap has anything to do clean air, food and water? How many cores will a CPU need in order to provide people with clean air, food and water?
Does that sound silly?
Not half as silly as the fact that the avatars in that creepy Second Life thing use up as much electricity as Brazilians living their real lives.
But this is a low power chip!
Ahh, so the Matrix will be powered by wave, wind and solar power, and the terminator robots can have more juice allocated to biomechanics because their brains will be Energy Star Compliant! Slap a Green Peace sticker on the ass end of that thing and bow down before it!
We’ll be a broke, chipped, surveilled and controlled in ways we probably can’t even imagine yet, but the desert of the real won’t seem so bad because our TVs and computers will have all those cores, and our Second Lives in the machine will melt away the bothersome issues with our real lives…
Or so Intel would have you believe.
Via: BBC:
A chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflops) has been unveiled by Intel.
The Teraflops chip is not a commercial release but could point the way to more powerful processors, said the firm.
The chip achieves performance on a piece of silicon no bigger than a fingernail that 11 years ago required a machine with 10,000 chips inside it.
The challenge is to find a way to program the many cores simultaneously.
…
There are already specialist chips with multiple cores – such as those used in router hardware and graphics cards – but Dr Mark Bull, at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, said multi-core chips were forcing a sea-change in the programming of desktop applications.
“It’s not too difficult to find two or four independent things you can do concurrently, finding 80 or more things is more difficult, especially for desktop applications.
“It is going to require quite a revolution in software programming.
“Massive parallelism has been the preserve of the minority – a few people doing high-performance scientific computing.
“But that sort of thing is going to have to find its way into the mainstream.”
Related: All Electric Vehicles and the Concept of Enough
Olmert: “Netanyahu Established Hamas, Gave it Life”
February 13th, 2007Well, well, well…
It’s weird, these precious few moments of clarity.
Via: Jerusalem Post:
According to Olmert, he would attend the meeting to explore possibilities for a “diplomatic horizon.” An argument then broke out between the prime minister and Netanyahu when the opposition leader accused Olmert of giving in to Abbas.
To that, Olmert replied, “Netanyahu has gone back to being the same old Netanyahu,” and accused him of directly contributing to strengthening the Hamas movement by releasing the movement’s founder, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, during his term as prime minister.
“Netanyahu established Hamas, gave it life, freed Sheikh Yassin and gave him the opportunity to blossom,” he said, adding that the current political situation in the Palestinian Authority came about “because of the nonsense that was done while Netanyahu was prime minister.”
UNKNOWN DISEASE WIPING OUT BEE POPULATIONS
February 13th, 2007Via: ABC News / Reuters:
A mysterious disease is killing off U.S. honeybees, threatening to disrupt pollination of a range of crops and costing beekeepers hundreds of thousands of dollars, industry experts said on Monday.
Beekeepers in 22 states have reported losses of up to 80 percent of their colonies in recent weeks, leaving many unable to rent the bees to farmers of crops such as almonds and, later in the year, apples and blueberries.
“It’s unusual in terms of the widespread distribution and severity,” said Jerry Bromenshenk, a professor at the University of Montana at Missoula and chief executive of Bee Alert Technology, a company monitoring the problem.
Dave Hackenberg, a Pennsylvania beekeeper who reported the so-called Colony Collapse Disorder to researchers at Pennsylvania State University in November, said he had lost about 2,000 hives, which can each contain around 50,000 bees during the summer months.
He estimated that he will lose as much as $350,000 after accounting for lost income and the cost of replacing bees.
Researchers from state and federal agriculture agencies have been frustrated in their search for a cause because affected hives are often empty except for the queen and a few bees.
The number of bees in a hive typically diminishes over a period of days to the point where there are very few or none left, Hackenberg said. There is no indication of where the bees have gone or what drove them away, he said.
“The rate of loss is startling,” said Jeff Pettis, a bee researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Maryland.
Pettis said the bees may have been killed off by a combination of factors including parasitic mites and a lack of nectar in pollen. Scientists are also looking into whether there is a link with significant recent bee losses in some European countries, particularly Spain.
Bromenshenk of the University of Montana said the symptoms are similar to “Dwindling Disease” that affected the U.S. bee population during the 1960s. Some beekeepers have told him that they have been seeing the problem for up to two years but have not reported it to authorities.
Amazon International and Cryptogon
February 13th, 2007Readers are wondering if Cryptogon can receive a commission on items purchased from Amazon’s global sites. I didn’t know the answer, but since about 40% of Cryptogon readers are outside of the U.S., I decided to find out.
Yes, it is possible. I just had to sign up for the affiliate programs at EACH of Amazon’s global sites. Thanks to my wife, who is fluent in French, and Babelfish’s rough translation of German, something like 95% of Cryptogon readers can now help out just by buying their goods at Amazon via these links below.
Cryptogon has virtually no readers in Japan, however, one reader from there explicitly asked if it was possible for his purchases to add to Cryptogon commissions. I’m going to try to get my affiliate status with Amazon Japan sorted out soon.
Well, in order of the country-of-origin of non U.S. Cryptogon traffic, here you go:
Thanks to all of you who make a point of remembering to help Becky and me when you shop! It ALL adds up.
Stolen Kids Turned Into Terrifying Killers
February 12th, 2007I was surprised to see this article on CNN. There was, of course, no mention of the trauma and drug induced mind control that has been happening in the “developed” world. And there was definitely no mention of Robert Duncan O’Finioan:
I don’t quite know what to make of O’Finioan’s account, other than to say that it’s congruent with lots of similar horror stories that have lurked well below the surface for the last three decades. If 2% of what he says is true, well…
What else can I say? I bought a photocopied version of Walter Bowart’s almost impossible to find Operation Mind Control back in 1990, and that still stands out as probably THE most terrifying thing that I’ve ever read in my life. Some of Cathy Obrien’s tales shouldn’t be read late at night either.
To those of you who think that this isn’t happening, in any capacity in the U.S., and that it’s all a bunch of tinfoil hat nonsense, just take comfort in the CNN article that depicts the atrocities as being something that’s happening far, far away.
To those of you who aren’t too asleep to still believe in the “American Dream,” note the similarities between O’Finioan’s account, and what’s happening elsewhere, as reported by CNN below.
Note: This area of inquiry is much better served by Rigorous Intuition, because Jeff is willing to fill in the backstory much more effectively than I am. But since we’re now living in a world where mind controlled killer children are a suitable topic for CNN, I thought, why not…
Via: CNN:
Warlords are forcing children in conflicts around the world to become killing machines — nothing more than what one child advocate calls “cannon fodder.”
Some children are kidnapped from their schools or their beds, some are recruited after seeing their parents slaughtered, some may even choose to join the militias as their best hope for survival in war-torn countries from Colombia, and across Africa and the Middle East, to south Asia.
Once recruited, many are brainwashed, trained, given drugs and then sent into battle with orders to kill.
There is no escape for what the United Nations and human rights groups estimate are 250,000 child soldiers today. These children, some as young as 8, become fighters, sex slaves, spies and even human shields.
U.S. Military Plans for Cyber Counterattack
February 12th, 2007Via: Network World:
If the United States found itself under a major cyberattack aimed at undermining the nation’s critical information infrastructure, the Department of Defense is prepared, based on the authority of the president, to launch a cyber counterattack or an actual bombing of an attack source.
…
This week’s massive but unsuccessful denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the Internet’s root DNS, which targeted military and other networks, did not rise to the level of requiring response, but made the possibility of a massive Internet collapse more real than theoretical. Had the attack been successful there may have been a cyber counterstrike from the United States…
